Tales from Nesblandia

*When I was a kid – a very little one with pleated hair, short school uniform dress, curious eyes and always seeking my mother's attention, I lived in a small town in Nesblandia.
Nesblandia is my trademark even today.
I have a copyright on it – it’s my Word, my World, I invented it.
NESB is a label for people that come from a Non English Speaking Background (country). I am a NESB; I was born in Nesblandia.
Nesblandia is the biggest country on Earth.
About 85% of the Planet’s population live in Nesblandia. I am one of those.

Nesblandia, or more exactly the part of Nesblandia I was living in then, was, at the time of my childhood a patriarchal, peaceful, isolated from the rest of the World place. This was how my childish eyes perceived it until I reached almost adulthood.
The town where I lived and went to school was small, clean, stuck in the past, peaceful, quiet. It had about 15- 20.000 people, I think.

My school was a big and impressive building for the town’s standards. It had a façade built of grey granite; it had heavy doors made of solid, polished teak with big doorhandles of casted iron. I could hardly pull them open – they seemed to be childproof. On the top of the three massive doors of the entry hall, on the outside as well as on the inside, there were 3 owls, made of brass, perched on a laced affair of wrought iron. They were the symbols of knowledge – a bunch of scary old things, looking down onto us, kids, with metallic, cold, shiny eyes.

School was tough then, there. A lot was expected from little children. We had to work hard, study seriously and if not, we supported the bad consequences.
My Mom was a bit of a snob. Although not extremely educated herself, almost a high school dropout, she wanted me to be the first in class all the time.
When I did not so well in school, she would lecture me, punish me and even slap me.
Those were the times. Nobody knew any better then I suppose. It was common practice for parents to scare the wits out of you with punishment in order to rise you right.
I was an only child, my genitors had no time to have more – fate and politics separated them. My father was away, a political prisoner, arrested not many years after I was born. I could hardly remember him.

I lived in a small world inside which I created another one, my refuge. That of books.
The town had a Public Library – a lot of people then were avid readers. There was not much TV to watch, just one channel; no computers – just the movie theatres to go to in a small town like that.

At school, they forced us very early, starting with the second grade, to do two things: to have a library card and a savings account at the local Credit Union. I had both.
While saving pennies did not mean much to me at the time, as I had not desire to buy anything, reading books meant something. New worlds opened in front of my eyes like movies, whenever I immersed myself into reading.

At first, I was very much into fairy tales – I used to devour the stories of Grimm Brothers, legends and fairy tales of an international plethora of cultures, all sorts of things like that.
Every Saturday I went to the library by myself and borrowed new books. During the week, after school, I would come home and instead of doing my homework, I was reading my stories like it was no tomorrow. In a hurry, and hardly breathing at first, then my breathing rhythm changing at the pace of the plot.

Some of these books were thick and heavy, big collections of illustrated stories for kids to be read by the parents at bedtime. I could hardly carry them home at that age, especially in winter when the sidewalk became a skating arena in some places.

I loved it when my Mom had time to read me a bit in the evening – which was rather seldom, because she worked until 7 or 8 p.m. Once home, she was too tired and too busy cooking dinner and ironing my school uniform to have the patience after that to read me anything. When she did, she fell asleep with the book in her hand after about 10-15 minutes. Without disturbing her, I used to pull the book out of her hands and continue to read it myself, late into the night.
Sometimes, she would wake up and looking at the clock she would become mad at herself for falling asleep. But mainly at me, for failing to do so.
In the morning then, she had to work hard and be very vocal in order to wake me up for school.

By the third grade, I was a little star at our local library.
They asked me to bring in a photo, to be displayed on a panel in the lobby because I was they said, one of their best clients, reading more books than most adults in town.
I felt flattered and important. I was the best at something. My mom will be proud.
I for one, I was very proud.
I skipped all the way home singing and smiling at the passers by that afternoon to tell Mom. She was proud too, but not that happy – the photographs were not at all that cheap and she earned very little money.

In that part of Nesblandia, things worked like this: if a woman was married to a political prisoner, as punishment for her husband’s crimes she had to appear in front of a Judging Panel where she was demoted to the lowest level of work possible within the institution where she worked. That, after she dealt first with the local Secret Police, of course. If they did not find her too guilty within one year of interviews and even short arrests at times for 2-3 days, she was only demoted.
Sometimes, if found not 100% guilty of sharing her husband’s views, the woman was only fired and sent by the officials to work in a dirty and poorly paid place.
If the family had children over 14 years of age, the children were submitted to the same treatment. First, they were interviewed by the Secret Police, then they were expelled from school/university and finnaly they were sent to work somewhere in the mines, fields or in a best scenario, in a factory. They were never allowed to study again, because they were the children of a “traitor”.

My mom at the time I started school was just released from almost a year of detention in a women’s jail.
While she was there, I was in the care of my maternal Grandma, somewhere in the countryside. Mom was sentenced because she was married to a ‘traitor”.
She was allowed to work afterwards in a factory that produced spare parts for electrical equipment.
Before that, she was a clerk. Now she was not allowed to do that any more. This made her feel very bitter, ashamed and humiliated.
It made me feel bad, too. I was the daughter of a criminal. It was very embarrassing.
I tried to keep that from my school friends and their parents. When someone asked me where my father was, I told them he was working away from home, on a large construction site.
Later, I realised that most people thought that I had no father, being a natural child, maybe out of wedlock. They must have felt sorry for me and pretended to believe me.
Some of them though as I understood later, after listening to my explanation did not allow their children to play with me any more.

In a predicament like this, being the best at something, seemed to mean a great deal. Therefore I was overwhelmed with joy to have my photo taken and displayed in a library foyer.

By the age of 9, I had read all the fairy tales I could find at our small, provincial library.
At the suggestion of the librarian I started reading now the books of Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Two Years' Vacation, Captain Grant's Children, Around the World in Eighty Days etc), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Karl May’s Winnetou, The Apache Knight and Winnetou, The Treasure of Nugget Mountain, Washington Irving’s The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow, Johann Wyss's The Swiss Family Robinson, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and many others.
That was the age when I discovered also sci-fi as a genre and immersed myself into it with a vengeance. It was “all grown up literature” in my view and such a far cry from the fairy tales I used to read as a little girl.

The sci-fi books that I dwelled in, were mainly by Russian authors. The libraries all over the country were censored well against anything too threatening to the system/ideology/Marxism. There were Valentin Kataev’s writings, Yefremov's Andromeda, Alexander Belyaev’s The Amphibian, Professor Dowell’s Head, Aleksey Tolstoy’s Engineer Garin and his death ray and many others that I cannot remember, as they were tied together in a couple of collective works volumes.
Fact is that the balance was uneven, there were more of the Western titles on my library records than there were Soviet authors. That was a worry apparently as they were dearly bellowed by the Communist Regime and recommended by the school curriculum above all others. The old western classics I believe were not considered dangerous because they were mainly 19th Century authors and even the Communists in power were brought up with those books around, when they were children.

One day, my mom received a phone call from the library and she was summoned there urgently. They gave her my photo back and lectured her on the pitfalls of children not being properly parented.
They brought up my list of library borrowings showing her black on white what they meant, and how unbalanced my choices were.
They also recommended her to cancel my library card before it was too late.
Which she did, on the spot.

She was to frightened not to.